The Synthesis of Yoga - Sri Aurobindo Ashram

166 The Yoga of Divine Works
flame and smoke and frankincense. It is the divine love which so
emerges that, extended in inward feeling to the Divine in man
and all creatures in an active universal equality, will be more
potent for the perfectibility of life and a more real instrument
than the ineffective mental ideal of brotherhood can ever be. It
is this poured out into acts that could alone create a harmony
in the world and a true unity between all its creatures; all else
strives in vain towards that end so long as Divine Love has not
disclosed itself as the heart of the delivered manifestation in
terrestrial Nature.
It is here that the emergence of the secret psychic being in
us as the leader of the sacrifice is of the utmost importance; for
this inmost being alone can bring with it the full power of the
spirit in the act, the soul in the symbol. It alone can assure, even
while the spiritual consciousness is incomplete, the perennial
freshness and sincerity and beauty of the symbol and prevent
it from becoming a dead form or a corrupted and corrupting
magic; it alone can preserve for the act its power with its significance.
All the other members of our being, mind, life-force,
physical or body consciousness, are too much under the control
of the Ignorance to be a sure instrumentation and much less can
they be a guide or the source of an unerring impulse. Always the
greater part of the motive and action of these powers clings to the
old law, the deceiving tablets, the cherished inferior movements
of Nature and they meet with reluctance, alarm or revolt or
obstructing inertia the voices and the forces that call and impel
us to exceed and transform ourselves into a greater being and
a wider Nature. In their major part the response is either a
resistance or a qualified or temporising acquiescence; for even if
they follow the call, they yet tend — when not consciously, then
by automatic habit — to bring into the spiritual action their own
natural disabilities and errors. At every moment they are moved
to take egoistic advantage of the psychic and spiritual influences
and can be detected using the power, joy or light these bring
into us for a lower life-motive. Afterwards too, even when the
seeker has opened to the Divine Love transcendental, universal
or immanent, yet if he tries to pour it into life, he meets the